In promoting collaborative efforts in a fast-paced environment such as a business enterprise, there is a growing need to quickly bring together a team of people to work on a project or issue. Collaboration is often required to resolve pending issues in a variety of situations—for example, routine situations such as the ordering of items in an inventory and the resolution of claims in an insurance company, life-critical situations such as bringing hospital staff together for an emergency consultation, and time-critical situations such as responding to stock market changes in a brokerage firm. An advantage in being able to bring a team of people together quickly is a reduced delay in starting the team effort, which often results in a reduced delay in making a decision. This can lead to greater enterprise productivity.
A challenge in assembling a team of people is bringing the right combination of people together so that those who are selected will perform effectively together. One quality that is important for team effectiveness is social context, which is the combination of communication and shared knowledge. When people communicate with each other, they share knowledge, which in turn helps them communicate with each other more easily in the future, and so on—in this way, social context accumulates. An effective team shares significant social context.
In reality, team members will often come from different, pre-existing organizations. Whereas the members of a pre-existing organization might work well together because social context that accrues within that organization, two strangers from different organizations might not work as well together because of the lack of social context. On the other hand, two friends from two different organizations might work well together because of their mutual familiarity, even though they do not share much social context from an organizational structure perspective. Again, team effectiveness is closely related to the social context that is present.
What is needed is a technique to evaluate and use the social context of a potential team of people, for the purpose of selecting a team to perform one or more tasks effectively, without some of the disadvantages in the prior art.